The Tarikh-i Baihaki: life of Mas'ud of Ghazni
A Ghaznavid secretary's eyewitness history of 1030 to 1041, including the Turkmen entry into Khorasan.
Full title The Tarikh-i Baihaki, containing the life of Mas’ud son of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni: Persian text, Calcutta 1862
تاریخ بیهقی (تاریخ مسعودی)
Abu'l-Fazl Bayhaqi (995-1077); William Hook Morley (editor)
Abu'l-Fazl Bayhaqi (995 to 1077) served in the Ghaznavid chancery and wrote this Persian memoir and history of Sultan Mas'ud's reign, including the arrival of the Seljuk Turkmen (Oghuz) in Khorasan and the battle of Dandanaqan in 1040. The corpus holds scans of the 1862 Calcutta edition by W. H. Morley, of mixed OCR quality, but this guide has not read them and quotes nothing from them. The profile rests on the catalogue card.
- How they knew
- Eyewitness
- Who “Tartar” means here
- Not recorded. The card lists Ghaznavids, Seljuks, Oghuz (Turkmen), Qarakhanids and Khwarazmshahs, all in the 1030s, long before the Mongols.
- Why read it
- An eyewitness Persian account of the first Turkmen irruption from the steppe into the Islamic lands.
- Watch out
- Morley's text is uncritical and later editions supersede it. The atlas quotes nothing from this work.
What it says
No quotes from this one yet. Its text is out of reach for now, or the scan could not be read.
The fine print
How we know
firsthand The author saw the places or people described.
firsthand: Ghaznavid chancery secretary's memoir-history of 1030-1041, including the Seljuk Turkmen migration into Khorasan and the battle of Dandanaqan (1040)
Research notes
- Morley's text is uncritical; superseded by Fayyaz (Mashhad 1971) and Yahaqqi and Sayyidi (Tehran 2009), Persian scans of which exist on IA (20251229_20251229_2330) but were not verified.
Why it matters
Eyewitness Persian account of the first Turkmen (Oghuz) irruption from the steppe into the Islamic lands, the event that created 'Turkestan' as a political concept in Persian writing.
Places named
Khorasan; Khorezm; Ghazna; Transoxiana
Peoples named
Ghaznavids; Seljuks; Oghuz (Turkmen); Qarakhanids; Khwarazmshahs